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Shearing Sheep
Clippers used to shear sheep by hand
Early Mechanical Shears
A Modern Shearing Sheds
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Sheep were shorn by hand for hundred of years using a large pair of clippers similar to scissors. It took about 20 minutes for and experienced worker to shear a sheep by hand.
James Bolton Higham was an Melbourne inventor who patented the world’s first sheep shearing machine in 1968 in New South Wales. He knew that shearing by hand was inefficient and slow and designed a steam powered machine to drive mechanical clippers.
Unfortunately, Higham’s invention was never put to use but it did stir the imagination of other later inventors.
During the late 1800s, a number of investors built mechanical clippers for shearing. Frederick Wolsely built the most successful of these machines in 1877. In 1887 a race was organized between a hand-shearer and a machine shearer. The hand shearer was faster, but Wolseley’s machine shearer was able to remove an extra kilogram of wool from the hand shorn sheep.
James Wilson , the manager of ‘Dunlop’a sheep station near Bourke, New South Wales installed 40 machines in 1988. His shearers refused to use them and went on strike. When they retuned to work, three weeks later, Dunlop station became the first property in the world to shear an entire wool clip with machines.
By 1915 nearly every Australian shearing shed used mechanical shears. Today a good shear can clip a sheep in less than five minutes and can shear more than 200 sheep a day.
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